


Supernatural Powers of the Common House Cat

by Feneris



Category: Gravity Falls, Transcendence AU - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Transcendence, Cats, Gen, Government Incompedience, Invisibility, Magic, Redneck Cultists, Teleportation, Ugly Community Centers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-16
Updated: 2016-03-16
Packaged: 2018-05-27 03:39:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6268066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Feneris/pseuds/Feneris
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cats, had powers. Too be fair, nearly everything in the post-transcendence world had powers. But cats were particularly well known, as they frequently manifested the abilities of invisibility and teleportation. Despite how well known these powers were, the exact extent of them was poorly understood. Partially because powers varied between individual cats, but mostly because the cats rarely felt like cooperating with the researchers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Supernatural Powers of the Common House Cat

Cats had powers. This was not so unusual, in that nearly everything in the post-transcendence world had powers of some kind. But cats were particularly well known for manifesting supernatural powers. Studies had been done that showed that cats possessed The Sight. In numerous experiments over 97% of cats reacted to supernatural phenomena that were otherwise intangible to those without some form of The Sight. Cats had also demonstrated the ability to turn invisible, and occasionally the ability, to teleport. There were also rumors that some cats possessed the ability to see the future, but to date no one had come up with any conclusive proof either way. 

While David and Sarah couldn’t say for sure whether or not their cats could see the future, but they could certainly turn invisible, and teleportation wasn’t unheard of. Like humans, supernatural powers in cats varied. Skitz, their white and brown tabby with the shredded ear, didn’t seem to have any magical powers whatsoever. Which was a good thing for the small animals of Gravity Falls. 

Invisibility was by far the most common power. Most cats could turn themselves invisible for anywhere between a couple of minutes to a half an hour. Usually long enough for them to find someplace to hide from whatever was threatening them. Mango, their orange Abyssinian, could remain invisible for over an hour if he wanted to. However, Smoke, their grey Egyptian Mau, could stay invisible for days on end. She mostly used this power to try and get out of visits to the vet. It would have worked exceptionally well, if David couldn’t hear invisibility as cartoon soundtrack that was played whenever someone was trying to be sneaky. It didn’t help that she always chose to hide under the sofa in basement, every single time. There was nothing like stepping on an invisible cat in the middle of the middle of the night, when you were on your way to the fridge for a midnight snack. Char, their dark brown Burmese, had learned very quickly it was a bad idea of take naps on the couch when you were invisible. (Sarah hadn’t been able to sit down for days afterward.) 

Teleportation was slightly less common, but David and Sarah had still seen it many times. It was how they got their black cat, Mooch. They had encountered Mooch as a stray cat living in a junkyard in Fort St. John, in Northern BC. Apparently she had decided that she liked the look of them, because she teleported herself into their car when they pulled out of the yard. David had nearly drove the car into the ditch when a black cat materialized in his face while he was doing fifty kilometers an hour down a steep and winding dirt road. When they had left her at the SPCA, she had simply teleported back into their car once they were on the highway. At that point they had come to the resigned conclusion that they were getting a cat whether they liked it or not. Teleportation was what had gotten her into the linen closet in David and Sarah’s house, where she gave birth to her kittens, and she regularly used the power to bypass closed doors and sneak pieces of meat off the cutting board when David had his back turned in the kitchen. 

Of her four kittens, only one had seemingly inherited that power. Blink, a black and white patch cat, had been the only one of the litter that David and Sarah had kept, and that was because he was a prolific teleporter. David could sit down on the couch, and next thing he knew, he would hear the sharp crack of teleportation, and Blink would be sitting in his lap. It was not uncommon to see Blink walking across a room, only for him to disappear and reappear on the other side. David had even once watched Blink crouch down, pounce, only to teleport in the middle of the leap and come down on a mouse on the other side of the yard.

And as if to contrast Blink’s prolific use of his power, there was their fluffy brown tabby, Terror. Terror rarely used any kind of magic. While he would turn himself invisible if he was startled, he never teleported. Not even if he had been accidently shut in a room. Instead he would simply take a nap and wait for someone to open the door. But he could teleport, even if David and Sarah had only seen him do it once. 

It had been their second year in the house. A nice sunny summer day. David and Sarah had been sitting at the kitchen table, trying to get their stories straight before they tried to convince the tax office that they were actually common-law partners. Suddenly, a shivering, crying, sopping wet kitten had appeared right on their kitchen table. Sarah had wrapped that shivering kitten in a warm towel, and Mooch had come over to lick the water out of its fur and cuddle up to it. David’s personal theory was that someone had tried to drown the kitten and that it had teleported away in a desperate effort to save its life. David had won the coin toss, and had christened the kitten “Terror” on the grounds that he was sure the cat would grow up to be trouble. He was wrong. Terror grew up to be one of the laziest and friendliest cats either of them had ever seen. 

They never did find out who tried to drown Terror and they probably never would. In either case, neither David or Sarah ever saw Terror utilize his teleportation abilities afterwards. Not once. Whether it was because he never felt the need, or because he had used up whatever magic he had in that desperate teleportation that saved his life, they didn’t know either way. 

Or rather, they would never have known, if they hadn’t gone on a picking expedition to Wyoming one day. 

\---  
The Gravity Falls Community Center was supposed to help bring the whole town together and help facilitate involvement in the community. It had succeeded, in that it had brought the whole town together in agreement as to how much they all hated it. 

The whole project had been a disaster from the get-go. The town council had rammed the proposal through, over the vocal objections from at least half the town. All of whom pointed out that Gravity Falls already had a perfectly good community center, and there was no need for another one. Construction had been one mishap after another. Especially after the original contractors scammed nearly a hundred grand out of the town office, and fled to Barbados. The second set of contractors came complete with immediate suspicions of nepotism, and conflict-of-interest allegations. Workers on the site complained of unsafe working conditions and went on strike twice, and every day seemed to bring about another expensive disaster leading to even more costly delays. 

When it was all finished everyone stepped back and agreed that it was the ugliest building they had ever seen. The architects had tried to combine successful elements of both modern and classic designs, and had failed miserably. They had even included several large spires, which as far as anyone could tell served no purpose and clashed horribly with the rest of the building. The spires were so tall that David and Sarah could see them clearly from their house, all the way out of town. To make matters worse, the building immediately began experiencing serious maintenance issues ranging from bursting pipes to leaky ceilings, and as a result was hemorrhaging money. Nevermind the fact that construction had already gone nearly five hundred thousand dollars over budget, and that was excluding the extensive public relations campaign the town office launched to try and convince people that the whole project wasn’t actually the disaster it was rapidly turning out to be. 

A petition was already circulating around the town, proposing that the town of Gravity Falls should simply demolish the whole building. To no one’s surprise, another petition was also following in the heels of the first, suggesting that not only should the town blow up the new community center, they should make it a public event. A secret vote was also scheduled to take place, as to whether or not the town should lynch the mayor alongside the town council. 

It didn’t take a genius to figure out that things were going to get nasty, and that was before the convenience store started selling torches and pitchforks. David and Sarah both came to the conclusion that it was better to be out of town before the shit hit the fan, or rather before the rotten eggs hit the town council. 

To that end, they had thrown a dart at a map of North America and decided to go on a picking expedition to Wyoming. Like the community center, it had turned out to be a disaster from the beginning. Their first mistake was not turning around when they got a flat tire half-way through Idaho. Because that first flat tire was a warning for the next five they would experience before they even made it out of the state. 

Now it should be said that neither David or Sarah knew anything about cars. This was largely born out of a mutual disinterest in vehicles as anything beyond a convenient means of getting from one place to another. For all they knew there was a hamster wheel in the engine block, running a supernatural hamster that lived on gasoline. (Actually, that would have made the whole thing a lot easier to understand for them.) But, while they didn’t understand cars, both David and Sarah had a keen understanding of magic. 

As a result, their car was largely held together by a slap-dash array or wards, curses, magical bindings and threats. It wasn’t magiteck. Neither David or Sarah knew enough about cars to achieve the harmonious blending of engineering and enchantment present in any functional example of magiteck. What they had was a car that was held together by the supernatural equivalent of bailing twine, bubblegum, and duct tape. 

Consider the fact that in the time David and Sarah had owned the car, they had driven it across half the continent. Not to mention that in during those times the car had been shot, attacked with an axe, rammed by a hummer, driven through the front window of an abandoned Wal Mart, suffered a head-on collision with an elk, and had been taken over rough terrain on a regular basis. When you considered all that, the only thing that should have been surprising was that it took as long as it did for something to break, that couldn’t be fixed by slapping a warding seal on the alternator. 

Nonetheless it caught them both completely off guard when there was a loud bang from the car and smoke began billowing out from under the hood. Thankfully, Sarah managed to pull over without putting them in the ditch or taking out anyone. Coughing and swearing they sprang out of the car, threw up the hood, and stared into the engine compartment with mutual bewilderment.

“Nothing’s on fire,” Sarah noted.

“Nope,” David agreed. “Don’t see anything leaking.” 

“Me either,” Sarah replied. “Nothing sparking.”

“No dead animals wedged into the fan.”

“…”

“…”

“I have no clue what I’m looking at.”

“Neither do I.” 

So they defaulted on their usual routine for fixing the car. Which was to put yet another ward over a random part, followed by Sarah beating on the hood with a tire-iron, while David graphically described the tortures they would inflict on the vehicle if it didn’t start when they next turned the key. 

Nothing. Not even when Sarah got out the axe. (Which was kept in the back for the express purpose of threatening the car into submission.) Nor when David began kicking dents into the side with his steel-toed boots, cursing both the car and its makers. 

Nothing. It was dead. Not roadside fix was going to cut it this time. There was nothing left do but call a tow truck and try and calm down before it showed up. 

“I’m not getting any signal,” Sarah announced, staring down at her phone in dawning dismay.

“I’m not either,” David reported.

“Shit.”

“Now what?” David asked, staring up and down the back-country dirt road they had taken, on what Sarah insisted was a more interesting route. 

“We walk to that farmhouse over there, and see if the folks there will let us borrow their phone,” Sarah told him, pointing down the road to where a gravel driveway spilled over. “Not much else we can really do.”

David gave a worried leer towards the driveway. “I don’t know. I’m getting a bad vibe from that place.”

“You’re hearing something wrong?” Sarah asked worriedly.

“No,” David admitted. “Just a gut feeling. But,” He let out a long sigh. “Like you said. We don’t really have a choice in the matter here. Who knows how far we’d have to walk before we found another place that might let us borrow a phone.”

With a resigned sigh he pushed himself to his feet and began trudging off after Sarah, on their way to ask the farmhouse if there was phone they could borrow. 

That was mistake number two.

\---

David had remarked, as they walked up the driveway, that the house looked like the headquarters of a redneck demonic cult. 

He hated it when he was right like that. 

Which was how him and Sarah found themselves running for their lives across a field, while at least two dozen cultists opened fire on them with an array of firearms that would be illegal to own anywhere else in the world. 

“I fucking… hate… American… gun culture,” David gasped, as he tried to push himself to run faster.

“Shut up… and keep running,” Sarah snapped, trying her hardest to keep up with David’s longer legs. 

They were fucked and they knew it. The only cover in the wide open farmland had two dozen armed cultists between them and it. There were too many cultists to take on, even if they hadn’t been horribly outgunned. The only thing they could do was to run as fast as they could and hope they could make it out of firing range before they got shot, and it was a snowball’s chance in hell of that happening. 

Too make matters worse, the cultists knew it too. “Don’t worry too much about keeping them alive!” the cult leader yelled out to his followers. “Nicabaliz doesn’t care too much what shape they’re in when he gets them. Hell, the more scared they are, the better! Just keep firing!”

It was a miracle they hadn’t gotten shot already. Bullets were flying everywhere, sending dirt spraying into the air all around them. But they hadn’t gotten hit. The only injuries they had so far had been the slashes on their legs when they vaulted over the barbed wire fence. 

“Just… keep running,” Sarah gasped. “We’re nearly… to… the other fence.”

David didn’t see how putting another barbed wire fence between them and the cultists would improve their chances of survival, but he nonetheless tried to pushing a last bit of speed out of his burning legs in the crazy hope that it would suddenly make a difference.

The sharp crack of teleportation sounded across David’s supernatural hearing. Suddenly there was a fluffy brown tabby cat sitting on one of the fence posts. It looked like Terror. It couldn’t be Terror. There were millions of fluffy brown tabby cats across the country. Terror was back in Oregon. Cats couldn’t teleport that far. Even if he could there was no way Terror could know that they were in trouble and…

David’s exhausted legs suddenly gave way underneath him. He pitched to the ground. There was another loud crack, and he suddenly found himself face-first into a very familiar green carpet. 

“We’re… home?” Sarah said, shakily pushing herself to her feet and looking around with complete astonishment.

They were home. They had been teleported right into their living room, straight onto the ugly green carpet they had only gotten because it was on sale and it looked okay in the show room. It was home, the same couch, the same crappy TV they never watched. There was his collection of sword replicas on one wall, and the shelf filled with random historical knick-knacks that Sarah picked up whenever they went picking.

Terror was sitting on the arm of the couch, looking at them with what could only be bemusement. It was Terror, no mistake about it now. He hadn’t expended his teleportation magic when he was a kitten he…

Terror disappeared with another crack. David’s head was spinning. Terror had just teleported both him and Sarah over eight hundred miles back home from Wyoming. The current teleportation record for a non-energy-based being was just under five hundred miles, and that was just teleporting themselves, nevermind two full grown human passengers. The energy needed to do that was enormous, usually only demons or angels wielded that kind of power. This was…

“He brought back the car.” Sarah announced.

David pushed himself to his feet, ignoring the way his arms seemed to shake with the effort, and carefully made his way over to the window where Sarah was.

There was the car. Sitting in the driveway, looking exactly the same as it had when they had left it by the side of the road in Wyoming. The hood still up, and the dents still in the side. 

It was then that David suddenly became aware of something being wrong with their skyline. His mouth moved soundlessly as he pointed to the top of the tree line.

Sarah followed his arm, putting into words what David’s overloaded mind couldn’t.

“Where’s the community center?”

\---

“FIND THEM!” the cult leader roared. “THEY CAN’T HAVE GONE FAR! NOT THE TWO OF THEM AT THE SAME TIME!”  
“Can’t we just find another sacrifice?” one of the braver souls in the cult dared to ask. 

“FUCK THE SACRIFICE!” the leader screamed back. “WE CAN’T LET THEM GET AWAY! IF THEY DO, THEY’LL TELL THE COPS, AND THE FUCKING FBI WILL BE ALL OVER US! I SWEAR WHEN I FIND THEM I’M GONNA…”

“Miaow.”

Two dozen cultists looked down. A fluffy brown tabby cat had suddenly appeared in the middle of their group. 

“IT'S THAT DAMN CAT!” The leader yelled, grabbing his gun and pointing it at Terror. “IT HAD SOMETHING TO DO WITH THOSE TWO DISAPPEARING! I’M GONNA BLOW IT ALL THE WAY TO...”

It was then that the cult became aware of the large shadow that had suddenly appeared over them.

Terror disappeared, just before the Gravity Falls Community Center hit the ground.

**Author's Note:**

> Just a reminder that I am taking requests to help further expand David and Sarah's place in the TAU universe. So if there is any aspect of the world, or a headcannon you want explored, post it in the comments and I will see what I can do about it. 
> 
> And if you want more with the cats. I'll see what I can do.
> 
> Oh and just so everyone knows. Terror is just a regular cat, not a demon in disguise or something like that. Just a cat with exceptionally powerful teleportation abilities.


End file.
